So, I just finished off the first part of an important task for school and today when I was going to continue, the document with my notes were gone. The only fragment I've got left of my file is the back up file, which doesn't show in the folder where I saved the document, but I can search for it.

Is there anyway which allows me to open the back up file, save it as a text file and continue my task? I don't really have the time for running restoring tools, which never has helped me in a satisfactory way anyway.

I wrote the document in gedit and my version of Ubuntu is 12.10.